 by Gloria Hansen, Hightstown (East Windsor Twp.), New Jersey
As the author of eleven titles in the Free Stuff on the Internet series of books, I have a good understanding of what is free for the taking. As a web designer and developer, and one who often answers questions from people in the quilt community on various web-related issues, I am also clarifying what is not free. There is an unfortunate misconception that once anything is published on the Internet it is free for anyone to use however they want. Not so. In fact, if you did not create the image, the text, or the underlying HTML and scripts, you need permission from the owner before you can republish it. Without permission, you have violated the owner's copyright and can be subject to legal consequences.
But wait! What about downloading images to your hard drive to look at for inspiration? What about printing an article to read away from your computer or to save for reference? What about looking at source code to better understand how a webpage was built? Are these copyright violations? No. These examples are okay; it's part of the free stuff and is in part what the Internet is all about. What you cannot do is republish, adapt, or amend any information you take from someone's site and present it to the public as your own.
Information published on the web is particularly vulnerable to copyright infringement because the nature of the technology makes it very easy to download. As the digital age emerged and the ease of infringement became widespread - it takes only a few mouse-clicks to help yourself to whatever you want to take from a site - concerns grew. In 1997, Congress passed the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act to facilitate prosecution of copyright violation on the Internet. In 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) amended U.S. copyright law to, in part, strengthen the legal protection for authors and other "content creators."
The most common form of infringement on the web is using images without permission. Some people download the image, upload it to their site, and republish it. Others do not download the image, but instead link to it. This is known as "inlining" or the process of displaying an image on one website that originates from another. Inlining not only takes your image without permission but steals your bandwidth, too! If you become aware of someone linking to your image, the easiest way to stop it is to change the name of your image. If this is a concern, you can ask your web host to configure its server to not serve your images to third-party websites. Other issues concerning artists include the taking of articles of text, posted patterns, and newsletters. Important to understand is that republishing (or adapting) someone else's material and giving name credit does not change the fact that you still need permission. Thus ask.
Continued...
(The rest of this story can be found in your issue of The Quilting Quarterly. Not an NQA member? Click here!)
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